The Days of Mohammed eBook

“Come,” said Nathan, “to my wife
and children, that we may all return thanks together.
Verily ’Many are the afflictions of the righteous,
but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.’
’Blessed be God, which hath not turned away
my prayer, nor his mercy from me.’ ’I
had fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness
of the Lord in the land of the living.’
’My flesh faileth, but God is the strength of
my heart, and my portion forever.’”

So, uttering exclamations from the pages of Scripture,
did the devout Jew pass onward to his home, which
was once more filled with “joy and gladness,
thanksgiving and the voice of melody.” Before
leaving, Yusuf presented him with the ring containing
the little stone, as a memento of his deliverance.

And Abraham? He received the full weight of the
scourge; and may we be pardoned in anticipating, and
say that for two days he lay nursing his wrath and
his wounds; but, on the third day after his imprisonment,
his agility suddenly returned. He managed in
some inexplicable way known only to himself to work
free of his fetters, and when the keeper came with
food in the evening, blinded by the dim light of the
cell, he did not perceive the little peddler crouched
in a heap in the middle of the floor.

Scarcely was the door opened when the Jew bounced
like a ball past the keeper’s feet, almost upsetting
him; then, darting like an arrow between the astonished
guards without, he was off. A hue and cry was
raised, but the little peddler had disappeared as
completely as if the earth had opened up and swallowed
him.

CHAPTER IX.

AmziatMedina.

“With half-shut eyes
ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half dream!
To dream and dream like yonder
amber light
Which will not leave the myrrh-bush
on the height.”

—­Tennyson.

Without entering into detail it may be briefly stated
that the success of Mohammed’s disciples in
Medina was simply marvelous. Converts joined
them every day, while those who were not prepared to
believe in the Meccan’s divine mission were
at least anxious to see and hear the prophet.

Amzi did no work in behalf of the new religion.
He was simply an onlooker, though not an unsympathetic
one; and, it must be confessed, he spent most of his
time in that voluptuous do-nothingness in which the
wealthy Oriental dreams away so much of his time,—­sitting
or reclining on perfumed cushions, a fan in his hand
and a long pipe at his mouth, too languid, too listless,
even to talk; listening to the soft murmur of Nature’s
music, the night-wind sighing through the trees beneath
a star-gemmed sky, the song of a solitary bulbul warbling
plaintively among the myrtle and oleander blooms,
the plash of a fountain rippling near with “a
sound as of a hidden brook in the leafy month of June”;
this, the exquisite languor of the East, “for
which the speech of England has no name,” the
“Kaif” of the Arab, the drowsy falseness
of the Lotos-eaters’ ideal: